I recently interviewed Lindsay Dow for Lingsprout and asked her about using social media for language learning. She talked about Snapchat, Instagram and Periscope, which made me feel a bit old but it was pretty fun talking to her! Also the thing I liked about both Snapchat and Periscope is their ephemeral nature, which makes speaking a language you’re learning a lot less scary than YouTube, for example.

I recorded another video for Lingsprout and it looks like this is going to be a regular thing. Gabriel Wyner taught me how to make my own language learning resources and also why phonics is so important.

Since the first interview with Chris Parker went well, I did second video interview for Lingsprout. This time I interviewed Jeremy Ginsburg AKA “the Vietnomad”, whose incredible story was on Benny Lewis’s blog.

Unlike the previous interview I did, this one was more of a “how to” than a story. I dug in and pushed pretty hard on one topic—What can you do in terms of social interactions to learn a foreign language in a country as a beginner?

I did a video interview of Chris Parker of Fluent in Mandarin on Lingsprout. It requires a login to view, but everything on the site is free:

It was about 15 minutes and covered his background as a monolingual kid in the UK, his transition to being a foreign guest on Chinese TV what his friends back home thought when they saw it. Check it out here: Becoming fluent in Mandarin with Chris Parker

The English teaching market is massive and growing. For a lot of people from the US, UK or commonwealth countries, it’s a great way to travel while young and experience more of the world. Online teaching is growing at an even more explosive rate—14.2% per year in Asia, 13.8% per year in Latin America. (Ambient Insight: 2011-2016 World Wide English Language Learning Market Overview)

Why teach English online?

Teaching online has a few advantages over traditional classroom teaching. It’s flexible, it’s efficient and it’s also becoming the first place aspiring students look.

Working online tends to be flexible

If you’re teaching online, you can teach from anywhere. This means you don’t have to worry about visas. You don’t have to travel if you don’t want to. Or you could move to someplace really inexpensive in Eastern Europe or SE Asia and teach students from first world countries at a salary much higher than you would earn locally. It’s fantastic work for a Digital Nomad who wants to save more money.

There are several ways of teaching languages online that fairly closely mirror the experience of teaching at a university or in a cram school. Those are pretty inflexible, but there are also a lot of options that give you more scheduling flexibility. TutorABC is kind of a middle of the road option that will give you some training materials and guidance, but expects you to get a TEFL certificate and to be available during certain times that have high student demand. At the top of the flexibility spectrum, Italki and Verbling offer the teacher full freedom to chose the hours they are available.

Efficiency—there’s no commute better than no commute

It should go without saying that if you teach online you have the best commute in the world.

More and more students are moving online

The major reason why online English learning is growing at roughly 14% per year for in Asia and Latin America is that the students are moving online. Children are generally augmenting traditional schooling with some educational apps and other products, but many, many adults are moving to online classes. One of the starkest examples is in Japan.

A couple of years ago, the Japanese “eikaiwa” or English conversation class market went through yet another shock as has become common over the past few decades. The market as a whole is growing, but not at anything like the rate that it was during the 80s. This time however, the largest online school RareJob, came out a huge winner. Founded in 2007 in the Philippines, RareJob had about 70,000 students in October of 2012 and grew to over 200,000 by early 2014. At the same time, more and more Japanese students have been joining online learning platforms such as Italki.

Teaching offline is still huge. It still offers pretty all the benefits I got from doing it a decade ago. But online teaching is growing quickly, which means there are special opportunities for people who jump in now.

Who can teach English online?

The requirements vary from job to job, of course. But you should be able to find some sort of English teaching job online if you:

Are a Native English speaker

Have a reliable internet connection suitable for video chat

Are over 16 years old

Have at least a willingness to learn how to teach effectively

Can take payment online (Paypal, etc)

Enjoy talking with people

You can get better teaching work if you meet any of the criteria below:

Have experience teaching

Are physically attractive, friendly and/or competent looking

Know how to market your services

Have a teaching certification or degree

Know a language spoken by a lot of English learners (Chinese, Spanish, Japanese, etc)

Have a very flexible schedule

Basically, most people who are reading this article can teach online. About half the platforms I’ve seen want teachers with some experience. Requirements for specific degrees are rare outside of the online classrooms affiliated with brick and mortar institutions, and requirements for teaching certificates are pretty rare as well. I don’t know of any online platforms that require teachers to be bilingual, but it’s definitely an asset. I’ve see quite a few taking advantage of their foreign language skills to connect with students and teach them more effectively, especially beginners who just can’t understand that much English yet.

The downsides of teaching online

I would be remiss if I didn’t point out a few things that aren’t ideal about teaching a foreign language over video chat. It’s a huge, global opportunity but there are some areas where it falls short compared to actually being in a classroom environment.

Your improvement as a teacher is up to you

In general, you can’t expect to get much help or training from your schools. It’s somewhat questionable whether an in person school will really give you that much training. When I was running an English school in Taiwan, I had an extensive training system that involved trainees watch dozens of classes, take notes and slowly ease into teaching 5 minute segments, 15 minute segments, full classes and then one week substitutions before being given a class of their own to take over for a full semester. I gave them feedback and made sure they mastered each skill they needed along the way. Many brick and mortar schools don’t put so much into training, but some do. You can be almost certain an online school won’t.

Even if you’re a traditional language school that doesn’t offer much training, you can still probably find some opportunity to watch a more experienced teacher teach the same material you teach. You could also probably ask them questions at lunch or between classes.

Less certainty

Any language school can go out of business or shut down. But things are moving quickly in the online world. What’s an incredible opportunity now might be gone in a few years. One individual site might suddenly lose 70% of their site traffic due to an update in Google’s search ranking algorithms and have to start firing teachers. A school might suddenly pivot from using teachers for one on one classes to hosting their own pre-recorded classes. You really have to be willing to tolerate a bit more uncertainty if you’re working online. Fortunately, you’ll likely have multiple platforms you’re teaching on and maybe other income streams as well.

The entire world is competing with you

Crowd, by James Cridland

Remember that school I mentioned in the section about more students moving online? The biggest online English school in Japan? Well, RareJob Inc is based in the Philippines. Their teachers make about $2 per hour. If you’re in any country where English is the native language, you probably don’t want to teach for $2 per hour. But that’s what you’re competing against. Everybody is on the internet.

There are other teachers such as Gabby Wallace who have built huge personal brands and teach large numbers of students directly. Next in line are people with niche brands who teach groups on their own sites. Even tutoring one on one on a large platform can turn out well. Chad Hansen has earned over $100k tutoring individual students on Verbling. But remember, if you <i>can’t</i> differentiate yourself, the wage floor is very low in an online market.

Platforms for online language teaching

Using someone else’s platform is the easiest way to get started. If you’re on your own, you’ve got to figure out how to find students. You’ll need your own website, marketing channel and more. In exchange for a (usually) modest cut of what students pay, you get placement on a high traffic site, there’s usually a decent pipeline of paying students, and the platform handles payment processing for you. Unless you already have a following, this is a great trade.

There are many, many different platforms for teaching a language online, and it’s not possible to cover all of them. Instead, I’ll list four of the largest options—TutorABC, Italki, Verbling and Udemy.

TutorABC

TutorABC is based in Taiwan and focuses on EFL for Chinese speakers. They have their own system and they have a pretty strong pipeline of students. Unlike most online schools, they provide some training! Since they promote a conversational approach to learning, you don’t need to know that much about grammar, phonics or other features of English. As long as you’re patient, and enthusiastic you can probably get by fine.

On the downside, the pay isn’t that great. It’s only $8 per hour base plus some amount that depends on student reviews. According to reviews on Glassdoor, after bonuses, it’s about $10 per hour. They also insist that teachers are available for at least some of their times with the highest student demand (i.e. their evenings and weekends).

Recap

Bachelor’s degree or ESL teaching experience required

Teachers must have some availability during peak hours

Training provided

Conversational methods expected

Pays ~$10/hour

Italki

Italki is based in Hong Kong. It’s a massive platform that currently has over 1.5M language students learning over 100 different languages. There are a lot of free features—language learners can message each other, do language exchanges, write journal entries in the languages they’re learning and correct the journals others are writing in their native language.

There are two types of paid Italki tutors. There are “professional” teachers, who have to go through an application process. In general, they have to have some experience actually teaching classes in their language, but the process isn’t entirely transparent. The second type is “informal” teachers. As far as I can tell there isn’t really much of any lower bar for conversation teachers as long as they speak the language fluently.

Teachers can choose their own prices on iTalki. Professional teachers tend to charge more than conversation teachers, but there’s a huge range for both. Professional teachers who are native English speakers tend to be in the $15-20 per hour range with a few making as much as $45 per hour for specialized test preparation or business courses. Native English-speaking informal teachers are centered around $13-$17 per hour. Italki takes 15%.

After lessons are scheduled on the platform, students exchange Skype information and do their classes over video chat. Since Italki has a Chinese ICP license, they’re not blocked in China. They also support Alipay in addition to Paypal, so they’re Chinese students and teachers are very well represented.

Recap

Massive platform for 100+ languages

Teachers set their own prices

Italki takes 15%

Teachers are divided into “Professional” and “Informal” categories

Lessons are arranged via chat and taught on Skype

Well supported in China

Verbling

Verbling is a tech start-up based in San Francisco. Like Italki, it’s a platform for learners and teachers of many different languages. I would say it’s got a huge technology lead over the competition. Disclosure here: I was one of the two engineers employed on their small team up until the end of this summer, so I am definitely a bit biased! I’ll let the ongoing roll-out of new features speak for itself.

Verbling has a free “Community” chat feature I mentioned in an earlier guide on how to learn a language for under $500. It also has one on one tutoring and a newer, “Tandem” option for students to take lesson with a partner at a discounted price. European languages are particularly well represented on the platform, but unfortunately Verbling is blocked by the Chinese firewall. This doesn’t mean there aren’t any Chinese students or teachers, but it means that only the small fraction who have a VPN or other way around the firewall can use the site from within China.

Unlike iTalki, Verbling doesn’t separate teachers into professional and informal categories. There’s a high bar for all of them. Without a degree, certification or impressive experience there’s a good chance of your application being rejected. The upside of this is that Verbling doesn’t feel as much like a race to the bottom as some other platforms do. I’ve actually noticed some teachers listed both on Verbling and on iTalki with different rates! In general, I think an English teacher can charge about $20-25 per hour on Verbling. As with iTalki, there’s quite a bit of variation and a lot of it comes down to how good a teacher’s ratings, reviews and welcome videos are.

Recap

Large platform for many languages

Teachers set their own prices

Verbling takes 15%

Teacher applications must pass a high bar

Lessons are launched from the platform via Google Hangouts

Blocked in China

Rapidly improving platform

Udemy

Udemy is a completely different kind of beast from TutorABC, Italki, or Verbling. Rather than teach one on one lessons, instructors record videos and upload them to Udemy to be watched by however many students purchase the course. Then students can interact with the teacher via forums integrated into each video lesson on the platform.

Like the online tutoring options, Udemy instructors live and die by the ratings their students give them. Unlike the others, Udemy has huge winners. It also has a lot of courses that teachers spent weeks creating that generate little to no earnings. Udemy is also continually growing and changing, so anything specific I write about earnings splits will likely soon go out of date. That said, they take about 50%, but there are some circumstances when instructors can make a higher share.

One of Udemy’s major advantages and disadvantages is its formidable email marketing of discounts. If you allow Udemy to discount your courses, you can get massive distribution. On the other hand, it’s very likely they’ll discount your $397 English course to $19 for a weekend to make sales. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it’s something to be aware of when you’re planning, creating and pricing your course.

In general, I suggest Udemy for people who have some free time and who aren’t in a big hurry to earn more. It offers an opportunity for 95% passive income if you make a great course, but it’s high risk. Some instructors have earned over a million dollars from their courses. Many, many more have failed to earn enough for it to have been worth their while. It’s absolutely a viable way to go, but it requires some strategy and you probably won’t do very well until you have multiple courses up. In this way, it’s somewhat similar to writing ebooks for the kindle store.

Recap

Large platform for subjects languages

English-language site

Instructors create, and upload video courses

Students watch videos and can ask teachers questions in forums

Instructors set their own prices but Udemy often runs promotions

Possible to achieve huge success

Mostly passive income is possible

Most sales go to a small number of instructors

More on platforms

Every platform mentioned above has some common characteristics:

All of them are a great help to those who don’t know how to market.

All of them have technology that most language teachers wouldn’t know build or set up.

All of them have policies that either hamper or forbid teachers from taking their students off the platform.

As a consequence, one thing holds true regardless of whether you’re tutoring one on one, teaching classes to groups or creating educational content. Platforms are a better deal when you’re starting out than if you have a huge following. After you have more success, it makes more sense to build your own site like Gabby Wallace did.

Concluding advice

There are a ton of ways to teach English online and even this lengthy article could only cover the largest of them. If you’re looking for quick, simple advice then I’d choose based on your current situation.

If you’re living someplace cheap and don’t have much experience teaching, try Italki (as an informal teacher) and TutorABC.

If you have more teaching experience, apply to Italki (as a professional teacher) and Verbling.

If you have time (e.g. you teach English 20 hours a week in Korea), then try Udemy.

If you’re already very good at teaching online or building courses on platforms, then start building your own following.

If you want to teach but have no experience and no savings, then teach offline first.

As it has become more and more popular to live the Digital Nomad lifestyle, Chiang Mai has emerged as what’s likely the most popular destination. I went there for a couple of months and here are my notes.

Digital nomads are people whose means of making a living comes from the internet and isn’t connected to living in any particular location. They are the “new rich” Tim Ferriss wrote about in his book, The 4-Hour Workweek. There’s a spectrum of digital nomad work that ranges from “almost a normal job” to “working four hours a week from the beach while sipping coconut water”. I’ll go over some of the strategies I’ve seen below.

The rise of the digital nomad

I first started hearing the term digital nomad in early 2013 amongst a few acquaintances in the tech scene in 2013. It’s only in 2015 that the movement has really been gaining steam. Many, many people who have read the The 4-Hour Workweek have since moved to cities such as Chiang Mai, Prague, Saigon or Cartagena and set about making the dream a reality. In fact, when I was in Chiang Mai a couple of months ago, it felt very much like everybody inspired by Tim Ferriss’s work had crowded into the city. The weekly Nomads and Coffee meetup organized by Johnny FD rapidly ballooned from a couple of dozen people to too many to fit in the coffee house!

The spectrum of digital nomad work

Almost a normal job

Setting your own schedule

Repeated income from previous work

Almost a normal job

The most conservative way to become a digital nomad is to just do the same work you were before but work remotely. Depending on your job you may or may not need to stay in a roughly compatible time zone as you were in. While you won’t exactly exactly have a 4HWW-style life, you can move someplace that’s much cheaper, save more, have new experiences, learn a foreign language and maybe even take advantage in the arbitrage of local economies to invest in yourself. Piano lessons are cheaper in Prague than in New York!

It can be hard to find a job that will hire remotely (and pay first world rates) but if that’s your goal, then a good place to start would be weworkremotely.com. Some famous companies that work mostly remotely are Automattic (the maker of WordPress, which powers this site) and Github. There are others, too.

An easier option is just work for your existing or previous employer remotely. A lot of people I know have been able to do that, including myself! After developing a good working relationship and proving your ability to generate meaningful business results, it’s usually not too hard to work out. In larger companies this can be difficult, but there’s often some leeway. For an American programmer, for example, health care costs are far higher in the US than they would be working remotely from a developed Asian country. This means it’s possible for the worker to retain the same level of income and benefits while saving money for the employer.

Setting your own schedule

The next level of freedom is to do some kind of work where you don’t have to work the same hours every week. It’s very likely you don’t need “full-time” employment to sustain yourself as a digital nomad. This is even true if you’re teaching English in Taiwan, China, Korea or elsewhere. If your employer makes you work 40 hours a week, it destroys some of the benefit of living in a cheaper country.

The solution is to start doing project-based freelance work. Ideal types of work for this kind of set-up are copywriting, blogging, design, translation and editing. Project-based gigs are also doable for software people, but quite a bit of work goes into finding high quality sources of work.

Repeated income from previous work

While it’s great to be able to set one’s own schedule, what really makes it possible to break into the ranks of the “New Rich” described in the 4-hour workweek is repeated income from previous work. This usually means either building your own marketing machine or building a product to plug into somebody else’s marketing machine.

Since it’s such an appealing prospect the rest of this article is devoted to how to decouple your earning powers from your working hours. The main options are:

Affiliate marketing

web publishing

writing ebooks

video publishing

creating courses

creating applications to sell

creating software as a service

selling physical products

Affiliate marketing

Affiliate marketing just means getting paid to help sell products or services others have created. Many creators use 3rd party services such as Clickbank or ShareASale to connect with affiliate marketers, but many others have created their own internal programs. If you trust the merchant to be running their program ethically, the payout is always better if you cut out the 3rd party service in the middle.

In order to sell someone else’s product, you need to have an audience to sell it to. This could be your personal blog. For example, if you click one of the links to 4-hour workweek in this post and buy it, Amazon will pay me a fraction of a dollar for helping them sell a copy (your price won’t be affected). Other common audiences are Twitter followers (very difficult), Facebook pages, or email lists (generally more effective). For obvious reasons, it helps you quite a bit if your audience knows, likes and trusts you at least on the topics you’re writing about. I wrote for nearly 10 years about language learning, language teaching and my personal experiences on this site and have a great deal of trust built up with my readers on these topics. It isn’t difficult at all to get people to try language learning products I recommend. Of course, the trust will only remain as long as I’m giving good suggestions!

My advice for the would-be affiliate marketer has two parts. First of all, find something you’re genuinely interested in, can write about and can give reasonably good advice about. Write about that on your blog and be absolutely as helpful as you possibly can to people. Collect email addresses. Review related products and don’t push them based on their affiliate commission structures. Try to be what Johnny calls an “Earnest Affiliate“, focusing on actually providing value to your readers. The more you do that, the more people will want to read your future pieces and the more they’ll share what you’ve already written with others.

The second piece of advice is to learn about how online marketing works. There are a ton of great resources. My personal favorite is Neil Patel. He writes at http://neilpatel.com/blog and has also written and compiled an impressive array of resources at Quicksprout. He offers very pricey personal coaching, but there’s more than enough free content on both those sites to become one of the top 10% of online marketers.

Web publishing

Web publishing is similar to affiliate marketing, but rather than spend a significant amount of time on marketing and selling-related activities, the primary focus is publishing content and building traffic. About 10 years ago, it wasn’t uncommon for people to make great earnings from Google Adsense. Believe it or not, it still happens. I saw it happen personally with a friend a couple of years ago, actually. He went from a few hundred dollars per month in Adsense, to a thousand to a few thousand, to twenty thousand and then to using higher-end advertising solutions such as Google’s DFP instead of Adsense. He went full-on digital nomad pretty quickly and as a result of all his travel I didn’t keep up with all the developments after that, but he definitely scaled up to five digits in monthly earnings without doing much with email, social media marketing or selling.

The secret? Get obscene amounts of traffic. Top out in Google search engine results for popular searches. Then do some optimizations around ad placement.

In order to be an effective ad publisher, you need to both pick one of the most popular niches on the internet—e.g. health, dating or career—and develop formidable SEO skills. This means, learning how to use google’s keyword tools to figure out what readers of your content are looking for, it means learning how to update your content to make it more useful and it means knowing what topics you have a reasonable shot at. Neil Patel (linked in the previous section) is also an excellent resource for this kind of information.

Writing ebooks

Writing ebooks is a surprisingly effective way to make good earnings. Ebooks can also be part of a larger marketing strategy, but here I’ll just cover the business of books themselves.

Amazon Kindle Store

If you have no audience and no distribution, then Amazon is a great way to get it. A 50 page book with the right title and cover in the right niche can bring in readers almost right away, especially if you can get a few positive reviews early on. Keeping your ranking is up to the quality of your work, of course.

It’s generally best to either write a bunch of books in the same general non-fiction category or to write a series or serial in a popular fiction category. Right now, the best selling categories are romance, suspense, survivalist prepper fiction, and sci-fi, swords & sorcery fantasy, vampire fiction and military fiction are also doing reasonably well.

If you price your book for $0.99 to $2.98 or more than $9.99, Amazon gives you a 30% commission. If you price between $2.99 and $9.99, then they pay 70%.

Selling ebooks through one’s own platform

If you do have an audience and you prefer not to have Amazon’s downward pricing pressure, then selling on your own is the way to go. You can do this with some kind of shopping cart system such as Member Mouse, by manually putting Paypal buttons on your site or by using a minimal system like Gumroad. I’ve used Paypal buttons before and I use Gumroad now (check out the guides link in my site navigation). I’m not really a fan of shopping carts. I find them clunky and annoying as a user.

Selling directly on your own site is also a great way to offer tiered products for which an email book is only one part. For example, you could sell your new cookbook with Korean recipes for $39, or the book plus videos for $99. For a great example, see Edmond Lau’s book, The Effective Engineer, which has tiers going all the way up to $699. Most authors I’ve spoken with have told me they’ve made the vast majority of their sales at the cheapest tier and still made more money from the most expensive one. It’s a great way to reach a level of income that sustains you without excluding the majority of people who just want the book.

I bought a mid-level tier and found it a great value as a software engineer in San Francisco. If I had been a software engineer working in Bangalore, the price tag might have just been too high to make sense, but the book only option still would have been a great value. If the lower tier didn’t exist, people with less money simply couldn’t get the product. If the higher tier didn’t exist, the author would miss out on a lot of revenue. Multiple tiers are a great way to get the best of both worlds.

Video publishing

Video publishing breaks down into the same general categories of “high traffic + ads” and “moderate traffic + sales” that text-based publishing does. In order to make it from ads alone on youtube you need hundreds of thousands or more likely millions of subscribers. If you’re doing product placements for something such as cosmetics, clothes, etc, you can make it much, much sooner. A lot of vine users went this route. Obviously it helps video if you’re young, attractive and/or famous.

The other massive source of people supporting themselves off of video is Twitch.tv. For those not familiar with it, Twitch is a where you can live-stream yourself playing (or even analyzing) video games. If you’re a top-level commentator of League of Legends, Starcraft 2 or other popular game you probably already have a Twitch account and paying monthly subscribers and don’t need to read this. If you’re not, but you are deeply obsessed with a particular video game or enjoy reviewing games, it’s probably worth trying live-streaming regularly for a few months and see if you can build a following. I wish that option had existed when I myself was a Starcraft-obsessed teenager!

Creating courses

If you have something to teach (and most of us do), a course is one of the very fastest ways to start earning an income online. In Chiangmai, I met quite a few people who had created courses on Udemy.com teaching everything from yoga to social skills to JavaScript.

Udemy is great for getting traffic. Assuming you’re proficient with recording video or screencasts, you can get your first course built within a week or so and be earning something, perhaps $100 in your first month. This will get more difficult over time, but now it’s still pretty open. On the downside, Udemy isn’t a great way to earn a lot. They aggressively offer discounts on their courses and after a while their users, myself included, start to assume that for any given $500 course, there’s a discount coupon that will let me buy it for $10. And if not, then within a month or so, Udemy will probably have a site-wide promotion letting me get it that cheaply. That said, one of my acquaintances doing software courses who has already eclipsed six figure Udemy earnings this year.

Once you do have a following (built through Udemy or elsewhere), the way to charge market rate for your courses is to sell them yourself. Once again, shopping cart plugins are a way to do it, but I’d strongly recommend keeping it simple and using something like Gumroad. They’ve actually added some tools that make it possible to release portions of a course one week at a time with new emails to customers and they’ve been adding new features at a furious pace. I’m a happy user of Gumroad, but other than that have no financial incentive to keep singing their praises here. To the best of my knowledge they don’t even have their own affiliate program. (If I’m wrong please tell me in the comments!)

Creating applications to sell

Creating software applications is a lot of work. The rewards for successful applications are sometimes enormous, but due to the real possibility of putting months of effort into something that earns nothing, I don’t recommend it for a first product.

App platforms

Probably the most popular platform is Apple’s App Store. It’s still the most profitable store I know of, but competition is intense. Choose carefully and bring your A game if this is your plan.The same general advice would go for Android apps, with the one difference that you’re likely to have a harder time making sales of paid apps and that you can probably get better distribution of in app advertising.

Steam has become pretty indie-friendly, but a lot of people are making games and the competition is intense. Fortune favors the unique here. Kongregate.com and other flash game sites are amazingly still trucking along in 2015, but if you don’t already have flash development skills, 2015 is a bit late to be investing in them.

Probably the less risky option I see for people making apps on someone else’s platform would be to make a WordPress plugin for professional users. WordPress now powers 15% of all the sites on the web and an awful lot of those sites are serving some sort of business purpose.

Selling apps directly

You actually don’t need to sell an app through a platform. You can just write the code, put it behind some kind of paywall and then share a link to it. Like I did with Zhuyin King (a Mandarin phonics trainer) right now. I could have put the app on Apple’s Mac Store. But I didn’t have any idea how much interest there was for it. I didn’t want to pay $100 to join Apple’s developer program just for an experiment. Also, it’s a lot easier for me to send people updates this way. I just wrote a very very rough prototype of the software and threw it up on Gumroad for $1.25. A few people bought it and made suggestions. I improved the UI and raised the price to $1.75. New customers had to pay that much but people who already bought got the updates for free. Then I added more content and raised the price to $2.49 for new customers. This is great. It means I can sell software still under development, price it appropriately and then regularly improve it based on feedback. People who buy early on get a great deal, I have no obligation to continue development and yet if I choose to I can easily keep improving the product without having to wait for Apple, Google or someone else to say okay.

That said, from an economic perspective, most people who don’t already have huge followings are probably better off plugging into someone else’s platform.

Selling software as a service

Selling software as a service is the holy grail for many, regardless of whether they plan to write it themselves or hire others to write it for them. Once you have a product people are willing to pay a monthly or yearly fee to use, your income becomes very predictable and your life choices expand greatly. It actually doesn’t even have to be software. It could also be something like a podcast or a blog that you sell a subscription to, but those choices generally come with the obligation to keep making new content.

The types of software that can be sold as a service are almost unlimited, but here are a few ideas: BufferApp (schedules your social media postings), Baremetrics (Stripe analytics for your business), Bingo Card Creator (makes bingo cards for teachers). It’s important to note that only the last of these businesses was run as a single developer for long. SaSS is brutally tough to go alone. If that’s what you’re doing, I suggest aiming for the simplest thing you possibly can.

Drawing stickers for chat apps

Mature messenger platforms often have stores where users can buy stickers and/or cover art. The people who create the stickers get a cut of the sales revenue. The specifics vary, but in most cases, it’s around 20%-50% after the fees for mobile app stores, the chat app’s share and taxes have been taken out. I made a set of stickers for the LINE messenger which was of very modest quality but still continues to sell at a slow pace. Like Kindle books, YouTube videos or even content on a web page, there are increasing returns to be had by continuing to create on the same platform since those who find one item they like will often look at others from the same creator.

Selling physical products

Amazon FBA is huge right now. It’s a pretty wide-open opportunity for people with enough savings to get by to ramp up their sales and cover some risk (~$300) of not being able to sell a product.

The way it works is you sell the product and Amazon ships it. A very common way to sell physical products is to buy in bulk from a Chinese factory (via Alibaba), have the product shipped to Amazon and then sell the product on Amazon. I’m far from an expert, but what my friend in SF did was basically this:

Find a product on Amazon with a relatively high sales ranking where the top listing had a rating of less than 4 stars.

Read all the three and four star reviews

Repeat for other products high up in the listing

Identify one or two ways to improve the product based on the reviews

Go on Alibaba and find a manufacturer to make the improved product for you

Risky is the new safe

It’s amazing to me how much easier it is to build a business online now than it used to be. Even when I was running a brick and mortar English teaching school with a couple of partners in Taiwan 7 years ago, I sometimes thought about how great it would be to be doing something that scaled more easily and something that didn’t tie me down to 60+ hours of work per week year in and year out.

When I went back to the US in 2012, I met some people with great jobs. But I also met people who were really struggling and who had basically done the “safe thing” all along, getting good grades, getting a degree from a renowned school and then joining “safer” career tracks. I still think that path is reasonably safe for those at the very top. But when there’s a big shift in the market and people have to retrain and compete with much younger people for a different role, the “dangerous path” taken by authors, freelance marketers and various small entrepreneurs starts to look pretty safe by comparison.

When I first started taking Chinese classes at the Mandarin Training Center in Taipei, I already knew pinyin… or at least I thought I did. I had a basic idea of how to spell Chinese words I heard. They had a phonics training course that used zhuyin and I figured it would be a waste of time.

I found a chart at the back of my Chinese-English dictionary that mapped every syllable initial and every final to its zhuyin equivalent. I knew from my Japanese classes in college that learning a new alphabet (or syllabary if you insist) isn’t that hard. Our teacher told us to learn the curly alphabet—hiragana—before our first day of class. She just gave us some worksheets and sent us off!

How I learned hiragana and katakana

It actually only took a day to pretty much get it down. I went row by row through the worksheet. After writing each character of the first row with あいうえお I closed my workbook and wrote each of them down. Then I checked and saw I’d made a mistake with あ and also with お. So I wrote them again and got them all right. Then I got a glass of water and wrote them again when I got back. Next, I practiced each character in the second row—かきくけこ. Then I closed the workbook and wrote them all from memory. After the fourth row or so, I tested myself on the whole thing and took a break for lunch. Upon getting home, I retested myself and then went on to the next row and continued like that.

I won’t say that my ability to write or even read hiragana was perfect at the end of the day, but it was about 95% there and I’d only spent about three or four hours, broken up into four sessions. When I woke up the next day, I tested myself on the full set of hiragana and got them all!

Next, I shifted focus to the more angular mean-looking Japanese alphabet called katakana. It was a bit harder because some of the symbols look almost the same. シ vs ツ and ソ vs ン. I was fine in class on Monday. I misread a few things, but it wasn’t a big deal and with constant exposure there was very little danger of forgetting any of them, unlike kanji which were my bane.

Learning bopomofo in one evening

Back to the original story… I was absolutely brimming with confidence when I discovered there was a Chinese alphabet, 注音符號, to learn. Equivalency table in hand, I just marched through the alphabet column by column, starting with ㄅㄆㄇㄈ and continuing until I reached ㄢㄣㄤㄥ and ㄦ.

Half a day and done! That’s all it took to learn to read and write the mandarin phonetic alphabet and if you’re already a Chinese speaker, you can probably power through it even more quickly using the method I described. If you’re someplace such as Taiwan or a school for overseas Chinese where it’s used, keeping it is pretty trivial and it opens up a lot of learning resources.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t already a Chinese speaker and I’d just made a horrible mistake.

Learning the symbols is easy, learning the sounds is hard

I actually should have taken that bopomofo phonics class. Learning to recognize and write the characters wasn’t the main thing to have worried about (or taken pride in). Learning the sounds of a foreign language is much harder task, especially if you’re over the age of about 5. The problem is that I learned Chinese first through Pinyin and I basically went through English phonics where possible. I quickly realized that something special was going on with x and q. A while later I realized the pinyin r and u also caught my attention fairly quickly and I got them mostly sorted. But I spoke Chinese every day for years developing some messed up pronunciation habits related to thinking that the b and d were basically the same sound in Chinese pinyin as in English. They’re not. In retrospect it seems blindingly obvious. I wouldn’t try to speak French as if every letter were pronounced exactly like in English. Why would I do that with Chinese?

But that’s a different story for another day. You can learn to read, write and recognize just about any alphabet in a day. Thai might be pushing it, but for Japanese, Korean, Chinese or Russian, it’s mostly about having a decent resource, preferably with some sort of mnemonic like those liked above, diving in and testing yourself. If you’re studying the language, you’ve really got no excuse not to go for it!

On a side note, I’ve recently made some improvements to the Pinyin – Zhuyin converter. It now converts zhuyin to pinyin and handles tonemarks, too.

Let’s face it. Most people spend a lot of money on foreign languages either directly or through their public schools and the results aren’t usually that great. [1]

What are the problems? Well the biggest one is probably that most people studying foreign languages don’t want to be studying them! Some of my old students in Taiwan showed up hating everything about English! It took countless months of benevolent brain washing and fun materials to get even half of them genuinely interested in a language they only needed at school. But I’m basically going to set that problem aside and talk about the difficulties for people who really do want to learn. Let’s look at the main options and then the problems (and strengths) of each.

The main options

Classes

Self study courses

Online tutoring

Offline tutoring

Conversation exchange

Immersion

Other online tools

Self-designed study methods

Classes

Classes with professional teachers are expensive.

It’s cheaper to be part of a large class, but most students want talking time.

It’s very difficult to handle students with very different levels of proficiency.

Most classes focus too much on grammar.

Most classes focus too much on intensive activities instead of extensive reading.

Classes tend to be very rigid in terms of when students can start or stop studying.

There are limited times when students can join or leave.

Group classes motivate people to study regularly.

Native speaking teachers can correct students.

Self-study courses (books + CDs/MP3s)

Most are of poor quality (this can be mitigated by looking at online reviews).

There’s no correction. This is a huge problem for pronunciation.

Don’t generally get students to the level where they can use native materials.

Good for learning vocabulary and basic grammar.

Usually a reasonable value for the price.

Online tutoring

Online tutoring extremely expensive due to its one on one nature.

Teachers don’t generally have the same incentives to make study plans as those making courses for schools.

It’s difficult to become friends with an online tutor and some platforms forbid it.

Due to the individualized attention, tutoring is very time efficient.

Students able to continue spending $5 to $30 per hour can learn to a very high level.

Students anywhere can learn from teachers anywhere.

It’s easy to switch teachers.

Offline tutoring

It’s more difficult to find offline tutors if you aren’t at a university or hostel.

There may not be a tutor for the language you want to learn where you live.

Offline tutors sometimes become genuine friends or introduce students to other native speakers who become friends.

There are no middleman costs from a platform or payment processors.

Conversation exchange

It takes some effort to find a good match (online or off)

Many conversation exchanges devolve into a struggle over which language to use.

There’s a MASSIVE imbalance between who wants to learn what languages. For every English speaker who wants to learn Arabic, there are probably 100 Arabic speakers who want to learn English.

People doing conversation exchange have to or at least should spend 1/2 of it helping the other person.

Conversation partners often end up becoming friends.

Conversation partners understand each other’s struggles.

Conversation exchange leads to more cultural understanding.

Conversation exchange is free.

Immersion

People are remarkably capable of creating their own language bubbles and resisting immersion. Just living in a country is no guarantee you’ll learn much.

Moving to another place is a huge life decision affecting work and relationships.

It’s costly to move and figure out how everything works in a new place (either in time or money or both).

The ability to take advantage of immersion to learn a language really depends on social skills, and sadly physical beauty. Not everyone can recruit the locals to help them learn.

Combined with study, immersion is one of the surest ways to learn a language.

It’s exciting.

It generally forces people to grow.

Other online tools

There is an ever-growing wealth of online tools available for learners. I’ve often thought my Chinese would have improved nearly twice as fast if I’d been born 10 years later and had access to those tools while I was learning.

A lot of great tools have a narrow focus and will help you with one specific aspect of learning a language. Obviously these can’t be relied upon exclusively, but they can definitely be valuable additions to your other activities. Anki, for example, is a long-time favorite of many language learners. Lang-8 is popular for those who like doing and receiving writing corrections. Another interesting option is LingQ. I will definitely write more about them in the future.

I’ve heard great things about some of the language-specific programs, in particular Frantastique for French learners. Due to their very high prices, though, I haven’t tried it out.

Podcasts are definitely worthwhile. The key is to find podcasts that are interesting, are at the right level and don’t waste your time with too much branding or chit chat in English.

The 100% free resources available online don’t tend to be time efficient.

Some of the most popular, like Duolingo are highly gamified, very addictive and not very effective. I’ve known some people who have spent hours a day on Duolingo for an entire year without developing basic speaking or listening abilities. Students with time but no money would be far better advised to take advantage of the free tier on something like LingQ and then start doing conversation exchanges after getting a basic foundation (or even after just getting enough to make it through one conversation on a pre-prepared topic).

Self-designed study methods

Only really an option for people who have experience learning languages and know what they’re doing.

Lowering your learning costs—the bottom line

Here’s the best advice I’ve got based on today’s tools:

1) Get a self-study textbook + CD set. I had a decent experience with Living Language for Spanish. It was like 3 textbooks (of which I did nearly two), plus CDs for only $30 on Amazon. Just work through that.

2) If you’re learning a language that it supports, use the free LingQ to build up some vocabulary through reading and download the audio for each lesson you’ve read. Listen to that when you’re out walking around. If you really like the service, then it’s probably worth the $10 per month.

3a) If your native language is popular enough (e.g. if you’re an English speaker learning French or if you’re a Japanese speaker learning Korean), then get a conversation partner on mylanguageexchange.com or on Italki.

3b) If you’re having a hard time finding a conversation partner because you’re learning English (or maybe Spanish or French), then go to Verbling, sign up and go to the community tab.

4) I’d suggest using tutoring on an as needed basis and make sure you have all the questions you need to ask prepared ahead of time. If you know exactly what you want, most teachers will be very helpful.

And repeat

As you improve, keep listening, keep reading and keep talking with people about whatever topics you can. You don’t need to spend a ton of time, but if you can do 30-90 minutes per day and keep at it, you will get at least basic proficiency and even counting a few intermediate-level books and tutoring sessions the cost will be under $500.

1. One exception would be northern Europeans. They’re outliers though. Their native languages are closely related to English, they’re pretty small in terms of speakers, and they can’t use their native languages abroad. They also from a very young age and get a great tons of input from English-language media that they don’t dub. A speaker of Spanish, Chinese, Japanese or especially English has a very, very different situation.